Self-Powered External Storage not recognized/randomly disconnecting

Dizzles · 16 Mar 2012

I have a 1TB external storage drive that uses its own power supply and connects to my laptop via USB 2.0 cable. For months I've had absolutely no problem out of the device, until the computer randomly decided to forget the device was plugged in. Now I'm lucky to get the device to be recognized by the computer at all, and when it is recognized, if I try to move anything to/from the device, the connection is immediately severed from the computer.

I use this device for my backup as well as holding on to things I would rather not get rid of. All my drivers are up to date, I've done all the Power Management checking and unchecking that I've read from other threads found via Google search, and still it won't work correctly for me. Any advice?

TVeblen · 16 Mar 2012

Providing you have done all the power options to attack the problem from the OS end of things, then you must consider that the drive itself is the problem. This seems likely since the drive has worked fine in the past.

The first suspect would be the USB cable, the connector on either end, or the port on either end.

The second suspect would be the hard drives power supply. These do go bad. If it is not supplying proper power then the drive will fail to be recognized correctly.

Try the drive on another computer. If it exhibits the same behavior there then you can narrow it down to one of the two issues above.